2023 superlatives

Others write about the best books of the year. I choose to focus on other superlatives when remembering my year of reading. Here are my choices for 2023.

Most Enchanting Book: Ghost Forest by Pik-Shuen Fung enchants less for its story — about a Chinese woman's growing relationship with her dying father — than for the way the author tells her story, using few words and lots of white space. Sometimes less really is more.

Most Important Book: "I Talk to the Trees" is a song from Paint Your Wagon. In The Power of Trees, Peter Wohlleben argues that we should let the trees talk to us. We might learn something about saving the planet.

Most Daunting Book: I tried reading Charles Dickens's massive classic Bleak House while I was in college. This year I finally read it through, and with pleasure.

Wisest Book: In Letter to the American Church, Eric Metaxas compares the American church today to the German church in the 1930s,  too reluctant to speak out against the social and political changes that threaten our culture.

Most Familiar Book: This year I reread Bel Kaufman's Up the Down Staircase, which raised a stir back in the 1960s. It still seems innovative and still gives pleasure.

Most Incomprehensible Book: Michio Kaku wrote Physics of the Impossible for the common reader, but it's still physics and much of it I found incomprehensible. Yet I loved the book.

Most Beautiful Book: There are many contenders for this prize, but I give it to Charlotte McConaghy's Once There Were Wolves, which is about a woman's attempt to reintroduce wolves to the Scottish Highlands and then becoming involved in a murder case.

Most Fearless Book: I described Cleaning Nabokov's House as a Cinderella story yet Cinderella didn't run a whorehouse. Author Leslie Daniels showed some guts,

Most Surprising Book: Steven Johnson surprised me in How We Got to Now by pointing out, to cite one example, how the telephone made skyscrapers possible.

Most Unpleasant Book: I found Mark Twain's racist comments in Following the Equator most unpleasant.

Most Luminous Book: I expected to like Karen Fowler's We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves because I enjoyed her other novels, but I didn't expect to love it as much as I do. It's wonderful.

A Game for Readers (2023 edition)

When the year draws to a close, I like to play a little game where I answer 12 questions by using the titles of books read over the past 12 months. Let's try it again.

Describe yourself: A Fish Out of Water (less pretentious than A Dedicated Man)

How do you feel: These Precious Days

Describe where you currently live: Such a Quiet Place

If you could go anywhere, where would you go: Following the Equator

Your favorite form of transportation: The Night Ship

Your best friend is: The Puzzler

You and your friends are: We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

What's the weather like where you are: A Fine Summer's Day (I know it's winter, but I'm in Florida)

What is the best advice that you could give: Give Unto Others

Thought for the day: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

How would you like to die: Before the Poison (better than after the poison)

What is your soul's present condition: Words Fail Me

Taking dreams seriously

In other cultures and in earlier times even in western culture, dreams have been taken seriously. The Bible tells us much about pharaoh's dreams, Nebuchadnezzar's dreams, Joseph's dreams and so on. Yet more recently in the West we have become reluctant to even mention our dreams to others, even though when we do mention them we discover that we often have similar dreams — about not studying for a college test, about being naked in public, about flying, etc.

In Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey (2018), Alice Robb takes dreams seriously, and she explores the insights of scientists and dreamers who do the same.

Robb argues that our dreams can tell us something, but that also we can tell our dreams something. As for the latter, she writes about techniques that some people use to guide the direction of their dreams and to make nightmares less common or less frightening. Other techniques she describes help some people remember their dreams or to dream more lucid dreams.

Dreams offer "a window into our psyches," she writes. They can tell us what's really bothering us, and in some cases they can even provide solutions. There are many examples of individuals solving problems because of inspiration gained in a dream. Such people as Stephen King and Salvador Dali have used dreams as inspiration for some of their creations.

A sitcom husband is often chastised by his wife for something he did in her dream. Robb tells us this sort of thing can actually happen when dreams are confused with reality.

Robb suggests keeping a dream journal and sharing dreams regularly with like-minded individuals. If our minds are going to provide us with so much nighttime entertainment, why not remember it, share it and discuss it — just like one might do with a good book or movie?

Robot makeover

I'm programmed to be paranoid.

Martha Wells, Artificial Condition

I loved Isaac Asimov's novels and short stories about robots. They centered around the Three Laws of Robotics, which seemed simple enough, but in Asimov's imagination led to a variety of perplexing ethical questions and plot twists.

Now Martha Wells has raised the stakes in her Murderbot Diaries series of novels, the second of which, Artificial Condition (2018), I have just read. Where Asimov just had humans and robots to deal with, Wells imagines an even more complex future. There are simple robots. There are robots, or constructs, with a little bit of human tissue, brains and feelings mixed in. There are augmented humans who are partly robotic. And then there are humans.

Murderbot, as it calls itself because it was designed to protect humans by often killing other humans, is a construct that has become a free agent by disabling the governor that allows it to be controlled. Yet it is human enough to feel compelled to help humans who engage its services, even though it would much rather just watch television. In this novel, Murderbot helps three foolish humans trying to retrieve important files from a woman who wants to kill them.

Murderbot undergoes surgery to allow it to pass as an augmented human. To accomplish this it allies reluctantly with a robot that controls a spaceship and is capable of doing things Murderbot cannot do alone.

This short novel, like its predecessor, All Systems Red and like all those Isaac Asimov stories, fires the reader's imagination as it entertains with an exciting tale.

Books require patience

Books require patience at every level — creating them, producing them, marketing them, selling them, and reading them.

Jeff Deutsch, In Praise of Good Bookstores

There are reports of writers churning out a book in a manner of days, but this is rare. Most writers invest months, even years, in writing their books. It takes patience. Then more patience may be required while trying to find someone willing to publish it.

As Jeff Deutsch points out in the line quoted above from In Praise of Good Bookstores, the other steps in the life of a book require patience, as well.

An agent may be needed to sell that book to a publisher, but the agent will probably want to read the book first. Then someone at a publishing house, and perhaps several publishing houses, must read the book to determine if it is worth publishing. Then comes the editing, which requires more patience while the anxious author waits, and then the cover design and the marketing, which add to the wait.

Some readers can knock off a book a day, but most of us read more slowly. It may take us days, weeks, months, even years to finish a book. It it's a good book, it may take readers and critics several years, even decades, to determine just how good it really is. It all takes time.

Yet as a bookseller, Deutsch's main point is that selling books requires patience, too, and this is often ignored by booksellers eager to make a profit. If a book doesn't sell quickly, it may be yanked from the shelf too quickly and replaced with a newer book that may have a better chance at success.

Deutsch argues that books need to be given a chance to find their readers, and vice versa. That takes patience.

The good with the bad

Born in Iowa, Bill Bryson has spent most of his life in Great Britain. He met and married an English woman on a visit and stayed. In the early  1990s, he and his wife decided to move to the United States for a time to give their children a chance to experience life in another country. Before he went, however, Bryson took a goodbye tour of Great Britain, and the result was Notes from a Small Island (1992).

Readers of Bryson's other travel books will know what to expect: rapture and ridicule, delight and disgust, the good and the bad alternating each step along the way. Everything is described in hilarious detail, but the bad is always much funnier than the good.

He writes a lot about architecture. Bradford's role in life, he says, is "to make every place else in the world look better in comparison." Two new buildings in Inverness he calls "two piles of heartbreak." He has nothing good to say about the British habit of tearing down beautiful old buildings to construct modern monstrosities.

He describes a certain castle as "everyone's favorite ruin after Princess Margaret." He calls Liverpool "a festival of litter." He hates the metal chairs now found in so many beautiful English cathedrals.

He often pans the places where he stays and the restaurants where he eats. He discusses hotel dining rooms where you get "three courses of pompous description and overcooked disappointment."

One of the highlights of his tour, and there are many more than I am suggesting here, is the chance to see This Is Cinerama once again. This movie extravangza, which introduced the short-lived Cinerama films, delighted him when he was a boy back in the 1950s, and is shown, or at least was shown at this time, on a regular basis in an otherwise unimpressive British town. Bryson visited just to see the movie again and was not disappointed.

His book, though now decades old, does not disappoint either.

Things that need to be healed

A wind had arisen — and it touched them now,, gently, reminding them, and it had rain on its breath, a token of that which heals the things that need to be healed.

Alexander McCall Smith, How to Raise an Elephant

Alexander McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency novels are so light and fluffy and charming that we may read them without even noticing that they carry serious themes — that they are actually about something.

Precious and Grace, for example, was about grace, not Grace Makutsi but rather the power of forgiveness. The author expands on this theme in How to Raise an Elephant (2020). The line quoted above is the last line in the novel, nicely summing up everything that has taken place. It's been all about healing the things that need to be healed.

As Botswana suffers from a long drought, Charlie finds himself with a baby elephant in his care. The mother has been killed by poachers, and now the mechanic/junior detective feeds it baby formula in his backyard. Soon everyone in the detective agency and the adjoining garage becomes involved in caring for the elephant, and they enlist the aid of Mma Potokwane, who runs the Orphan Farm. She should certainly know what to do with an orphan elephant, they think — and she does.

Meanwhile a distant relative of Precious Ramotswe comes to her asking for money. After visiting the woman, both Precious and Grace become suspicious. Something doesn't add up. And a quarreling couple move into the house next to that of Precious and Mr. J.LB. Matekoni.

All of these issues, drought included, require healing, and in just 242 light, fluffy and charming pages we watch it happen.

About bumblepuppies and mammiferous hamadryads

Why is it that the words we most like to say and most like to hear are so often words that are hardly ever used? Meanwhile words we don't like the sound of — such as no, fattening, gut, war, gun violence and politically correct — are heard all the time.

Take the word bumblepuppy. Have you ever heard the word spoken? Me neither. But wouldn't it be fun to use it in conversation? It is the name of a game played with a tennis ball tied to a post, a game I have never played or seen anyone else play. So the word goes unused and we have to settle for pickleball, which isn't bad. The word bumblepuppy has actually been given other meanings to increase its use, but those other meanings — a particular fishing fly, for example — haven't helped much.

A hamadryad, according to one artist

Then there's hamadryad, which can mean either an Abyssinian baboon, a tree-dwelling nymph or a certain venomous Indian snake, none of them things we are likely to talk about. And so the delicious word goes mostly unused.

Mammiferous simply means having breasts, so it could be used more often if it weren't so impolite and, in most cases, so unnecessary. Even so, it is fun to say.

I would love to be able to use the word firkin in conversation, but until I find myself discussing a small tub of butter I am out of luck.

Some enjoyable words are much more common and most people know the meanings of them, yet even so we rarely have the chance to either say them or hear them. I am thinking of words like lollipop, daffodil, ephemeral, lullaby and rutabaga.

A slang version of daffodil is daffodowndilly, which is more rare but also much more fun to say.

Other worlds

What child after reading or listening to a parent read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis hasn't wished for a such wardrobe or a magic closet through which one could, by entering and going deep enough, walk into another world?

Scene from Outlander on Starz

Many adults who read Diana Gabaldon's Outlander may experience a similar fantasy. Why can't I find a place where I can be suddenly transported to a faraway time and meet the perfect lover?

Yet the best we can hope for is to realize that books, these two and others, are themselves doors into other worlds. Jeannette Winterson suggested this very thing when she said, "Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and go through into another world."

Are books a poor substitute for reality? Well, yes and no. Certainly a real romance is better than an imagined romance. Actually going to Paris beats reading a novel set in Paris. (When I visited England I read a novel set in England, enjoying the best of both worlds.)

Yet through our reading we can have experiences that would be impossible in real life. Or if possible, they would be dangerous, uncomfortable or morally wrong. How many women have imagined affairs with the men they meet in novels, such as those by Gabaldon, without having to break their marriage vows? How many men have imagined killing other men in crime stories or war stories or westerns and then closed the book without guilt?

Sometimes fantasy trumps reality.

A modern Cinderella

Cleaning Nabokov's House, the 2011 novel by Leslie Daniels, amounts to a modern Cinderella story, although instead of a glass slipper there are, as Daniels tells us in the opening lines, a blue pot floating in a lake, a house where Vladimir Nabokov once lived, a book, a lawyer, a whorehouse, science and from there the world.

As the story opens Barb Barrett, pushing 40, has lost everything — her husband, her two children and her self-respect. She left her home of her own will and now cannot return. Her husband has already found another woman and has won custody of the children.

She finds herself living in a house where the author of Lolita once lived (as did the author herself, it turns out), and there she finds scraps of a novel, perhaps a draft written by Nabokov himself. The novel is about Babe Ruth, hardly a likely topic for the author more interested in butterflies than baseball. But perhaps he did write it. Can she turn the book into enough money to win back her children?

Barb does make enough money to resuscitate her life, but it comes not through the book but through that whorehouse. She notices that the town where she lives seems to be full of bored housewives, and so she hires college men to be her whores, who mostly just listen to the women talk. She manages to turn it into scientific research. The fact that the judge who decides her custody appeal has been one of her clients helps her win her case. And, yes, there is a charming prince.

As with Cinderella, not much here is convincing, yet readers get the happy ending they desire. And unlike Cinderella, this story is hilarious. Daniels is a wonderfully comic writer whose sentences dazzle. Yet I can find no trace of a second Leslie Daniels novel. Too bad.

Death in Dublin

In John Banville's latest Quirke novel, The Lock-Up (2023), the Dublin pathologist has returned to his hard-drinking, melancholy ways. His beloved wife, Evelyn, died at the end of the previous novel, April in Spain, and Dr. Quirke is lost without her.

Yet he is not lost enough not see something suspicious about the apparent suicide of a young Jewish woman, Rosa Jacobs, in a rented garage, or lock-up. John Strafford, the police detective who killed the man who killed Evelyn in Spain, becomes involved in the case. Quirke doesn't like Strafford, feeling he should have shot the killer before Evelyn was killed, not afterward, and he dislikes Stafford even more after he becomes involved with his daughter, Phoebe, with whom Quirke now lives.

The story takes place in the 1950s, not long after the close of World War II. A German man with a connection to Rosa, has become prominent in Ireland because of his wealth. Now he becomes a suspect in her murder, especially after his son happens to be in Israel at the same time as another Jewish woman, also with a connection to Rosa, is killed under mysterious circumstances.

In between bouts of Quirke's drunkenness and their disagreements with each other, he and Strafford find resolution to the case. Or do they? The surprising final chapter suggests they aren't even close.

Banville's mysteries, many of them written under the name of Benjamin Black, tend to be atmospheric and character-driven. The ending of this one may be disappointing — we like our heroes to actually outsmart the bad guys, even when they drink too much — but otherwise this entry ranks high in the series. And the unsolved mystery may give Banville a starting point for his next book.

Books teach reading

Roald Dahl

Teachers teach children to read, right? And sometimes parents do. Yet children's author Roald Dahl had a different idea: Books teach children to read. It makes sense.

Most of what we learn we learn because we want to learn it. You learn to bake a pie because you want to bake a pie. You learn auto mechanics because you have an interest in motors and machinery. And so it is with reading. My grandson learned to read at a young age, nearly two years before he started school, because he wanted to play a computer game that required reading.

The books that parents read to their young children, if they are exciting enough and funny enough, will encourage the children to want to learn to read such books by themselves.

Dahl's idea was to write the kind of books children like to read. And the books that children like to read are not necessarily the kind of books parents, teachers and librarians want them to read. The author of James and the Giant Peach and other classics often had trouble with publishers, parents, teachers and librarians for this very reason.

Dahl once described what, in his view, children love to read: "They love chocolates and toys and money. They love being made to giggle. They love seeing the villain meet a grisly death. But they hate descriptive passages and flowery prose. What else do they love? New inventions. Unorthodox methods. Eccentricity. Secret information. The list is long."

The writer also knew that children are not put off by long words providing those words are fun to say, with the definitions suggested by the context or the words themselves. He filled his books with many invented words: scrumdiddlyuptious, fizzwiggler and squizzle, for example. The words were fun to say and fun to imagine meanings for.

Dahl echoed an idea also expressed by C.S. Lewis, author of the Narnia books, when he said, "The nicest small children, without the slightest doubt, are those who have been fed upon fantasy. The nastiest are the ones who know all the facts."